DCFOUNTAIN.COM

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin repeatedly has attempted to brand Sen. Barack Obama as a terrorist sympathizer due to his very limited, casual professional acquaintance with William Ayers — a present-day respected college professor who in the turbulent 1960s had been a militant anti-war activist.

Guilt by association under such flimsy circumstances is a tactic normally only raised during fits of political desperation, as seems to be the case with Palin’s outrageous claims. Annenberg Political Fact Check found the McCain campaign’s assertions “groundless, false, dubious…seriously misleading.”

The Obama-Ayers connection is a loose one, to say the least: they live in the same neighborhood, Ayers held a small “coffee” fundraiser when Obama first ran for public office in 1995, and the two once served together on a couple of well-respected nonprofit education and anti-poverty boards. Noting that he was only 8 years old at the time, Obama has called Ayers’ youthful actions 40 years ago “despicable” and said he has no ongoing contact with him today whatsoever.

Palin has downplayed her own highly questionable and more recent associations, at least one of which — unlike the Obama-Ayers link — raises legitimate concerns about where her true allegiance lies. This very year she addressed the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) — a radical fringe group founded to promote Alaska’s secession from the United States but now officially advocating only an Alaska voter referendum on the issue.

Although the group’s Web site has been scrubbed of most overtly pro-independence rhetoric, its official platform retains various related demands such as the return of all federally held land to the state and people of Alaska.

The group’s founder, Joe Vogler, once proclaimed:

“I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions,” and, “The fires of hell are frozen glaziers compared to my hatred for the American government, and I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

Vogler served as AIP’s chairman until May 1993, when he mysteriously disappeared in a suspected burglary; his body was found the following year.

Following is a recent chronology of Palin’s links to the AIP:

• 1994 - Palin first attends an AIP convention, held that year in Wasilla, Alaska, where she was a councilwoman.
• 1995 - Her husband, Todd, joins the AIP.
• 2000 - Now mayor of Wasilla, Palin attends another AIP convention in her town.
• 2006 - Palin speaks at the AIP conference in Wasilla; she is elected governor in November.
• 2007 - AIP vice chairman Dexter Clark tells the 2nd annual Secessionist Convention in Tennessee that AIP got its wish by seeing Palin elected as governor, and he offered the following advice to secession-minded individuals in other states, “You should infiltrate…put the Republican label on it to get elected. That’s all there is to it.” (See video below)
• 2008 - Gov. Palin again addresses the AIP conference, held this year in Fairbanks, telling members, “We have a great promise to become a self-sufficient state.”

In typical times and circumstances, Palin’s connections to the AIP would be unworthy of mention. However, since she freely opted to begin hurling not just stones of association but entire boulders, she should not feign surprise when one suddenly comes crashing through her own glass house. Psstt…maybe it’s a gift from Russia.